[Apr 2024] Fees are HIGH, wait for opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs

[LoyceV]

how can one knows if Btc they hold are splitted into many small inputs?

Check your wallet, if it allows some form of coin control you can see it. If not, you'll have to check block explorers or import your addresses (watch-only) into for instance Electrum.

I mean I use to pay attention at the balance of my wallets but cannot see further.

Which wallet are you using?

Also, in case my Btc holdings are fractioned in thousands of inputs and I send my whole wallet balance to another addy of mine am I not consolidating it into one?

That's how it works, although thousands of inputs may be too much for one transaction.

[1714516887]

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[1714516887]

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[hopenotlate]

I mean I use to pay attention at the balance of my wallets but cannot see further.

Which wallet are you using?

Electrum on desktop and Jaxx on mobile

although thousands of inputs may be too much for one transaction.

don't get this part : is there a max of inputs depending on wallet am using or depending on blockchain itself?

[LoyceV]

Electrum on desktop and Jaxx on mobile

I don't know Jaxx, but on Electrum, enable the Coins tab to see al your inputs.

is there a max of inputs depending on wallet am using or depending on blockchain itself?

Probably both.

[hopenotlate]

Electrum on desktop and Jaxx on mobile

I don't know Jaxx, but on Electrum, enable the Coins tab to see al your inputs.
 - snip -

Thanks for the patience, going to check it.

[LoyceV]

In the past week, someone did a few large low-fee consolidations:

(image source)

At the moment, fees spike every few hours, after which mempool clears again:

(image source)

That may have to do with Bitcoin's recent price increase. Either way, it's a good time to consolidate small inputs at low fees

[LoyceV]

There's a mountain of low fee transactions waiting this week, so if you want a low-fee transaction this weekend, I'd go for 1.1 sat/vbyte instead of the bare minimum

[hopenotlate]

Maybe with this new Ordinals thing we won't see low fees so frequently as before for a bit: people is embedding a wide variety of stuff into Bitcoin blockchain seemengly without a clear plan in mind.

[HCP]

Maybe with this new Ordinals thing we won't see low fees so frequently as before for a bit: people is embedding a wide variety of stuff into Bitcoin blockchain seemengly without a clear plan in mind.

Oh the plan is most certainly to dupe people with FOMO into thinking they need/want the next imaginary internet thing... and should pay stupid money for it. NFTs 2.0...

[pooya87]

Maybe with this new Ordinals thing we won't see low fees so frequently as before for a bit: people is embedding a wide variety of stuff into Bitcoin blockchain seemengly without a clear plan in mind.

Oh the plan is most certainly to dupe people with FOMO into thinking they need/want the next imaginary internet thing... and should pay stupid money for it. NFTs 2.0...

Yeah, this is the new form of scam although I don't know how successful it is going to be because until this point the main hype is just in social media and hasn't completely manifested itself into a market where money changes hand to turn into full blown NFT 2.0 scam.

[philipma1957]

Maybe with this new Ordinals thing we won't see low fees so frequently as before for a bit: people is embedding a wide variety of stuff into Bitcoin blockchain seemengly without a clear plan in mind.

Oh the plan is most certainly to dupe people with FOMO into thinking they need/want the next imaginary internet thing... and should pay stupid money for it. NFTs 2.0...

Andy Warhol Campbells Soup

basically the first step to NFT.

I am thinking this will not go away.

[Poker Player]

Maybe with this new Ordinals thing we won't see low fees so frequently as before for a bit: people is embedding a wide variety of stuff into Bitcoin blockchain seemengly without a clear plan in mind.

I've seen talk about this for a while now, but I don't see the unconfirmed transaction count going up significantly other than at specific times. Except for one spike, the last week has been relatively low, and I've been sending transactions at the minimum fee for a while now and they are confirmed without much delay.

There's a mountain of low fee transactions waiting this week, so if you want a low-fee transaction this weekend, I'd go for 1.1 sat/vbyte instead of the bare minimum

What would be the reason for this? Maybe too many people doing like me?

[LoyceV]

Oh the plan is most certainly to dupe people with FOMO into thinking they need/want the next imaginary internet thing... and should pay stupid money for it. NFTs 2.0...

It will die off again once enough people lost their money, and the next hype gets created. The list gets longer and longer: altcoins > tokens > ICOs > Forks > DeFi > NFT > Ordinals. The concept is always the same: someone feels like he was too late to get into Bitcoin early, so he creates his own crap, hypes it, greedy people jump on it, the creator sells it and some sucker is left with a worthless and meaningless "digital item". Especially with ICOs it was very obvious many of them are created by the same people, and they must have earned billions from it. All I can say is: don't join!
Higher Bitcoin fees will only make this more expensive for them.

The whole concept of Ordinals it stupid, they're trying to make one satoshi worth more than another.

There's a mountain of low fee transactions waiting this week, so if you want a low-fee transaction this weekend, I'd go for 1.1 sat/vbyte instead of the bare minimum

What would be the reason for this? Maybe too many people doing like me?

The reason for which part? The "mountain"? Probably just spam with very large transactions. The 1.1? Miners take that before they take 1 sat/vbyte.

[JayJuanGee]

Oh the plan is most certainly to dupe people with FOMO into thinking they need/want the next imaginary internet thing... and should pay stupid money for it. NFTs 2.0...

It will die off again once enough people lost their money, and the next hype gets created. The list gets longer and longer: altcoins > tokens > ICOs > Forks > DeFi > NFT > Ordinals. The concept is always the same: someone feels like he was too late to get into Bitcoin early, so he creates his own crap, hypes it, greedy people jump on it, the creator sells it and some sucker is left with a worthless and meaningless "digital item". Especially with ICOs it was very obvious many of them are created by the same people, and they must have earned billions from it. All I can say is: don't join!
Higher Bitcoin fees will only make this more expensive for them.

The whole concept of Ordinals it stupid, they're trying to make one satoshi worth more than another.

There's a mountain of low fee transactions waiting this week, so if you want a low-fee transaction this weekend, I'd go for 1.1 sat/vbyte instead of the bare minimum

What would be the reason for this? Maybe too many people doing like me?

The reason for which part? The "mountain"? Probably just spam with very large transactions. The 1.1? Miners take that before they take 1 sat/vbyte.

The punchline still does seem to be that for the most part fees have not been changing very much whether or not cardinals and inscriptions have become more popular, and surely, it could be that normies are still learning about these kinds of ways to "use bitcoin" whether dumb or not and whether perceived to be valuable (or obstructive) towards how others feel about the use of blockspace or not.

For me, I would not mind seeing a bit of a sustainable bump in the bitcoin fees and the use of blockspace, yet the fact of the matter seems to be that bitcoin seems to be already largely prepared to handle these kinds of spikes in usage and able to expand quite a bit beyond the various ways that it is currently being used.... because the mempool is continuing to clear without too many sustainable fee increases (so far) and whether the whole hashing power of the network is overbuilt or not, we have had a lot of increases in the hashrate too in the past week or two (perhaps partly inspired by cardinals/inscriptions, but also just seemingly that hashrate is just constantly going up.. "going up forever Laura.")..

It appears that the difficulty adjustment is going to reach another ATH in the next 12-13 hours 38-39 hours from the time of this post:

Latest Block:   777922  (5 minutes ago)
Current Pace:   111.4256%  (1763 / 1582.22 expected, 180.78 ahead)
Previous Difficulty:   39350942467772.63                            
Current Difficulty:   39156400059293.19                            
Next Difficulty:   between 43557191408057 and 43635665058358
Next Difficulty Change:   between +11.2390% and +11.4394%
Previous Retarget:   February 12, 2023 at 1:50 AM  (-0.4944%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   Tomorrow at 3:23 PM  (in 1d 13h 50m 34s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Tomorrow at 3:56 PM  (in 1d 14h 23m 7s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 12d 13h 32m 47s and 12d 14h 5m 21s

https://www.bitrawr.com/difficulty-estimator

https://btc.com/stats/diff?_ga=2.166892222.1079250679.1586286038-48233127.1586286038

[LoyceV]

we have had a lot of increases in the hashrate too in the past week or two (perhaps partly inspired by cardinals/inscriptions, but also just seemingly that hashrate is just constantly going up.. "

My guess is the hashrate went up because Bitcoin's price went up. That may have been enough to make some miners turn on their hardware again (assuming they turned it off the moment it didn't produce enough to pay for it's electricity consumption).
That 11% increase in hashrate is going to lead to 11% less blocks. Considering the full blocks, I expect fees to go up a bit tomorrow.

[stompix]

For me, I would not mind seeing a bit of a sustainable bump in the bitcoin fees and the use of blockspace, yet the fact of the matter seems to be that bitcoin seems to be already largely prepared to handle these kinds of spikes in usage and able to expand quite a bit beyond the various ways that it is currently being used.... because the mempool is continuing to clear without too many sustainable fee increases (so far) and whether the whole hashing power of the network is overbuilt or not, we have had a lot of increases in the hashrate too in the past week or two (perhaps partly inspired by cardinals/inscriptions, but also just seemingly that hashrate is just constantly going up.. "going up forever Laura.")..

Ordinals and their hype had no direct effect on the hashrate, the hype started so recently that it wouldn't have been time even for the gear to be ordered, less much already received and installed to make for the increase. Plus the timing is not there, the mempool was flooded by them by the 7th, the last difficulty retarget happened on the 12th and was negative.

It's most likely an incredible amount of gear that was ordered a month prior and was still stuck in deposits or farms that at prices below 20k  were running their gear in low mode, plus even some farms that were offline in the previous two weeks (we had a -0.49 adjusted prior). A combination of factors, but ordinals are not one of them.

That 11% increase in hashrate is going to lead to 11% less blocks. Considering the full blocks, I expect fees to go up a bit tomorrow.

Not necessarily, it depends a lot on where the growth was concentrated, even if it's a bit random and a lot of luck involved the first days saw a higher time block than the last ones, so it is possible the currently installed hashrate is still growing by a bit, a few 1-4%, so we might still have extra blocks even in this period.
Anyhow the hype is dying down, the weekend is coming and we only have 4vMb worth of tx in the mempool, most likely it's going to be empty next morning, and a lot of free space during the weekend for 1sat/b consolidations.

 

[Poker Player]

The reason for which part? The "mountain"? Probably just spam with very large transactions. The 1.1? Miners take that before they take 1 sat/vbyte.

Yes, I was referring to that. I know it's sometimes due to casinos or exchanges consolidating, but it had been curious to me when making transactions recently that among the unconfirmed ones there were a lot with the minimum fee.

[flexor]

Why should I bother with UTXOs consolidation? Isn't it better to spend them separately when it is needed and the real necessity occurs? In my view  the separate and dedicated  UTXOs utilization for spending leads to improved privacy and saves your time. I can still understand the benefits of consolidation for tangible  fiat bills that may occupy place in you pocket but this is not the case applicable   to BTC.

[nc50lc]

-snip-

Because of the reason written in the OP.
More inputs produce higher transaction size which makes the fee higher, so small inputs that can't be used alone in your typical transactions are recommended to be consolidated.
So if most of your coins have good amount, there's no need for consolidation.

Privacy issue is also covered in the OP.

[flexor]

-snip-

Because of the reason written in the OP.
More inputs produce higher transaction size which makes the fee higher, so small inputs that can't be used alone in your typical transactions are recommended to be consolidated.
So if most of your coins have good amount, there's no need for consolidation.

Privacy issue is also covered in the OP.

Aside from everything which mentioned on first page, i can avoid bad scenario about paying very high fee when mempool is congested and i have tens or hundreds UTXO.

You don´t need more inputs if you have plenty of UTXOs with the variety of different values that allows to choose single one (or at least couple of them) to cover your current need. This is the key OP´s point.

[LoyceV]

This is the key OP´s point.

I don't get it: first, you ask what for what I've already explained in the OP, then you try to explain what my point is.
It's very simple: if you don't want or need to consolidate small inputs, it's not for you. Good for you. But it works very well for others, including myself.